Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth
The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy, who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1969, and is perhaps Roth’s best-known book.
Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. 'The Puzzled Penis', Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) it is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
In an astonishing feat of narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
(back cover)
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)
In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.
When She Was Good
Philip Roth
In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
Philip Roth
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town an aging Classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."
Everyman
Philip Roth
There is no more decorated American writer living today than Philip Roth, the New York Times best-selling author of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and numerous other distinctions.
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
Goodbye, Columbus
Philip Roth
Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin - he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills - meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella, the first book published by Phillip Roth, explores issues of both class and Jewish assimilation into American culture. It won the National Book Award in 1960.
©1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009
O Animal Moribundo
Philip Roth
David Kepesh tem cabelos brancos e mais de sessenta anos, é um eminente crítico cultural da TV e conferencista de grande mérito numa universidade de Nova Iorque, quando conhece Consuela Castillo, uma estudante bem-comportada e de boas maneiras, com vinte e quatro anos e filha de exilados cubanos ricos, que lança imediatamente a vida do professor num tumulto erótico.
Desde a revolução cultural dos anos 60, quando deixou a mulher e o filho, Kepesh experimentou viver aquilo a que chama uma "virilidade emancipada", fora do alcance da família ou de uma parceira. Ao longo dos anos refinou essa exuberante década de protesto e licenciosidade com uma vida ordenada em que é simultaneamente livre no mundo de Eros e estudiosamente dedicado na sua actividade estética. Mas a juventude e a beleza de Consuela, "uma obra-prima de volupté", transtornam-no por completo e uma enlouquecedora possessividade sexual transporta-o aos abismos do ciúme deformador. A despreocupada aventura erótica evolui ao longo de oito anos para uma história de cruel perda.
Críticas de imprensa
"Uma pequena e perturbante obra-prima."
David Lodge, New York Review of Books
«Novela sobre o amor (e o desejo) entre um homem velho e uma mulher jovem, que fala de sexo, ciúmes e morte [...] Uma obra-prima.»
Ana Cristina Leonardo, Expresso
Американська пастораль
Philip Roth
США після Другої світової війни. Епоха великих ілюзій та «американської мрії». Швед Лейвов — чесний і щирий хлопець з родини єврейських емігрантів. Усе його життя — це ідеально розпланований шлях: вступ до коледжу, бейсбольна команда, продовження справи батька на фабриці, успішне примноження родинних статків, одруження з красунею «Міс Нью-Джерсі», власний мурований будинок, люба дитина — справжня «американська мрія», втілена в життя. Та несподівано рай перетворюється на пекло, причиною чого стає єдина, найдорожча донька Меррі. Дівчина-підліток, фанатично захоплена комуністичними ідеями, скоює кривавий політичний злочин…
Чи зможе Швед Лейвов повернути втрачене щастя? І що, як насправді це була тільки його бездоганна ілюзія?
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